IAPBP Image Of The Year Competition 2017

Celebrating the Beauty of Birth

At the beginning of each year, the International Association of Professional Birth Photographers holds an image competition, pulling hundreds of entries from talented photographers all over the world into an epic display of the raw and powerful beauty that is childbirth. Incredible images from every type of birth, in every setting, and from many countries are displayed for global admiration – home birth, hospital birth, birth center, vaginal delivery, breech delivery, cesarean delivery, unmedicated and epidural births alike. This collection showcases the many facets of birth in the most stunning of ways; strength, weakness, support, vulnerability, pain, elation, relief. It is truly a sight to see all of the best images from the year together in a single gallery.

This year, there are four separate categories, and each member of IAPBP may submit one image into each: Labor, Delivery, Details, and Postpartum. A panel of judges evaluates the images based on technical integrity (focus, sharpness, detail, depth of field, color, brightness, contrast, saturation, usage of light, etc.), emotional value, and composition. Those judges, by the way? Nothing short of impressive and intimidating this year. So many big names in the birth community, including Ricky Lake & Abby Epstein, producers of the award-winning documentary The Business of Being Born, Catherine Pearson, senior reporter at The Huffington Post, Jan Tritten, founder of Midwifery Today, Peggy Vincent, a midwife, and author of Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife (an amazing read, by the way!), Kirsten Lewis, a Denver based family photojournalist, Dawn Thompson, founder of ImprovingBirth, and so many more.

It took all of the five days that submissions were open, but I finally narrowed it down to these four images for entry...